Beth Andrews by St. Georgeand the Dragon Page A

‘Let me help you, Miss Wood—’
    ‘There is no need, sir,’ she interrupted him, stopping momentarily and looking in the general direction of his voice. ‘I need no guide.’
    ‘No piece of furniture is ever moved more than an inch from its position,’ Rosalind elucidated, for the benefit of the two strangers.
    ‘I believe Rosalind measures the entire household each day with a special tape,’ Cassandra teased her companion. ‘But I fear it is very tedious for everyone to be so careful about the placement of every table, chair and vase in such a large house.’
    ‘It is no great hardship.’ Rosalind shrugged, though the other girl could not see this gesture.
    ‘No doubt it is even a pleasure,’ Julian said softly, ‘since it is a labor of love.’
    ‘Indeed.’ Rosalind frowned at him. He seemed so genuinely touched. How vile these men were!
    ‘But let us hear Miss Powell’s song,’ St George reminded them of their original intention.
    ‘It is quite different from my own,’ Cassandra admitted, seating herself at the harp and touching the strings with long, delicate fingers.
    ‘I have neither the voice nor the temperament for something so romantic.’
    Nevertheless, the first notes struck by the harpist were strong and sure. The words by Bunyan were as direct and forceful as the lady who sang them:
     
    ‘Who would true valor see,
    Let him come hither!
    One here will constant be,
    Come wind, come weather.’
     
    Different indeed, and one might have expected a louder and more percussive instrument than the harp. But somehow it seemed peculiarly fitting. Had not David, the warrior poet, also played the harp for Saul when that monarch was plagued by an evil spirit? Perhaps Rosalind presumed that her song would have a similar effect on the spirits of these two polite intruders, and drive them away from her own domain....
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Later that evening, after the gentlemen had bid them goodnight (promising, however, to visit them again as soon as they were able) the two women could not but revisit the evening in a lengthy tête-à-tête which kept them from sleep for some hours. Closeted in Cassandra’s bedchamber, they had already discarded the finery assumed for their guests and were clad only in their loose-fitting sleeping gowns.
    ‘Once more you must be my eyes, Lindy,’ Cassandra told the older girl. ‘I know what I heard, but what did you see?’
    Rosalind drew a deep breath, trying to summon the images which had been so vivid earlier. The details began to return to her as she recited them.
    ‘At first,’ she said, looking not at Cassandra but at the canopy above the bed, as though it were a painted screen upon which she saw the events depicted, ‘all was as I expected. They were both smiling and ingratiating: eager to please and to convince us both of their admiration.’
    ‘That much I gathered from their conversation,’ the girl beside her said. ‘Tell me something which I do not know.’
    ‘Our little concert was the crowning moment of the evening,’ Rosalind admitted.
    ‘How did Julian look?’ Cassandra asked.
    Julian? Rosalind turned her head and gazed at the other girl. She did not know which disturbed her most: the ease with which Cassandra used the gentleman’s Christian name, or the fact that it was so hard to blot out the image of Richard St George and focus on the younger man. But she must remember everything and relate what she could.
    ‘Never did I so strongly wish that you could see!’ Rosalind smiled in spite of herself.
    ‘Nor did I!’
    ‘While you sang,’ she said, warming to her theme, ‘young Master Marchmont became increasingly agitated.’
    ‘Did he?’
    ‘Oh yes.’ Rosalind actually chuckled at the memory. ‘He squirmed in his seat as though he were sitting upon hot coals.’
    ‘And so he should have. However did you manage to keep from going into whoops?’ Cassandra joined in her laughter.
    ‘That was not quite so difficult.’ Rosalind